Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  “Yeah, but have you seen him?”

  William argued further. “Who’s going to be stupid enough to kill a shorty in the place where you work? You’d know they’re going to look at us first thing. It’s got to be a guest. The chick hooked up with the wrong player. That’s all a hotel is about, really—hooking up.”

  “That’s all you’re about,” the dark girl teased, making Theresa wonder if that was true.

  He had the sense to shake his head in the presence of the mother whose daughter he was flirting with, ever so subtly. “In this place nobody knows who you are, and nobody cares. She thought she’d have some fun, but then he couldn’t pull out—know what I mean?”

  “What about other people?” the rounded boy on the steps suggested. “There’s delivery people here all the time.”

  “But they don’t leave sixth,” Lorraine said. “No reason for them to be up by the Presidential.”

  “Could be taking liquor to the Club Lounge.”

  “They drop it on six, Ray. Flunkies—’scuse me, porters—tote it the rest of the way.”

  “Wish they could drop a case on the way,” Ray said, then added to Theresa, “They’re renovating this for the eightieth anniversary of the Terminal Tower thing. Even though it will be like the eighty-third anniversary. So there’s construction guys, guys who fix the elevators, guys still patching the floor on eleven after a leak.”

  Just as their adult counterparts would have, the kids obviously saw the advantages of blaming the death on an outsider, someone they didn’t know and couldn’t be responsible for, someone who had moved on, no longer a threat. A very comforting scenario, practiced in every small town, school, business—any finite area in which a murder had taken place. And usually wrong.

  She glanced over at Sonia to see if her friend had caught this. At that moment she finally noticed that the loquacious Sonia had completely shut up. The height didn’t seem to bother her—she leaned against the outer wall without hesitation—and the woman would hardly be intimidated by teenagers after years at the PD.

  Theresa abandoned that line of thought and steered the kids toward more useful information. “How could someone get into a room without having a key?”

  She expected a few knowing looks and sly allusions to different methods, but all four stared at her blankly.

  Then, one by one, they shook their heads.

  “Nope.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “Those doors don’t open without a key card.”

  “You’d have to break it down.”

  Ray tried to help. “If you could go earlier and stuff the little hole that the bolt goes into, then when the door closed, it wouldn’t lock.”

  “But you’d still have to get the door open at some point, you moron,” William said.

  The appellation did not bother the kid. He grinned, scratched his ear with the stub of a partially amputated index finger, and suggested that the killer could have gotten hotel management to open the door earlier, for a delivery or repair. He beamed when William agreed.

  Theresa asked, “Have any recent guests stood out to you, their behavior or appearance or requests? Seen anything … unusual in a room?”

  “Like whips and chains?” Rachael asked, clearly delighting in Theresa’s reticence.

  “Sure. Or more blood than what would result from a shaving cut. Or any arguments you might have seen or overheard.”

  “Are you allowed to ask us that?” Lorraine wondered.

  “I don’t see why not. I’m not asking you to search their belongings. We’re just talking about what you might have already observed in the normal course of your duties. Just as you were before I walked in.”

  The kids visibly racked their brains to produce tales of the weird and strange, telling of a guest who wore a long black cape and of things found in rooms, ranging from bizarre pornography to inch-deep confetti (“clogged three vacuum cleaners in a row”).

  Rachael confessed that on her second day on the job, a well-kept older man had approached the front desk and asked where he could find a prostitute. “And he was very matter-of-fact about it, as if he were looking for the ice machine. I’m thinking, ‘Buddy, I’m an eighteen-year-old girl. Do I look like I’d know how to hire a prostitute?’ ”

  Don’t scream, Theresa told herself, at the thought of this dirty old man approaching your teenage daughter. Please don’t scream. “So what did you do?”

  “I told him that while the Ritz offers its guests many fine amenities, that isn’t one of them. He stood there for a minute or two, like he thought I was being a smart aleck. Then I guess it dawned on him that he could hardly complain to my manager that I’d refused to find him a hooker, and he went away.”

  Theresa stole another glance at Sonia, who appeared to listen, and yet the attorney’s face had lost its ruddiness and the kaleidoscope of emotions that usually churned there had smoothed out into a carefully still mask. Sonia’s eyes flickered from Rachael to the boy William, once, twice. Then she interrupted Lorraine midsentence to say, “I have to go. Nice to see you again.” She nodded to the group in general, turned, and disappeared around the curve of the outer observation deck.

  “Can you—” Theresa called after her.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  Okay, not afraid of heights or of elevators. So what was up with the assertive public defender?

  Lorraine went on. “I had a guy say he found a … um, sex toy in a room that he checked in to, like it was left by a previous guest. Thing is, the room hadn’t been rented for a few days before he checked in, and he said he found it right beside the bed on the floor, where no way I wouldn’t have seen it. He wanted us to comp the room because he was so offended, but the GM said not happening. That was the GM before Karla. Karla would have caved. You’d be amazed what they pull to try to get you to comp the room. Problem is, they do it by trying to get me in trouble.”

  Kind of like defense attorneys, Theresa thought.

  “Might want to rethink your career choice,” William said.

  “People always sayin’ that to me,” the girl admitted. “ ‘How can you be cleaning up after rich white folks, scrubbing their toilets all the time?’ But it ain’t that bad of a job.” She shifted on the platform, rubbing her lower back, and turned her face to the setting sun. “It keeps me moving, and it gives me plenty of time to think. And it’s quiet. I don’t have a supervisor breathing down my neck all day. And the shit … well, once you’ve changed diapers, you can touch anything. At least here I got rubber gloves. I’d rather be a maid than a waitress, scrambling around with people yelling at you all night.”

  “Waitresses get tips,” Rachael pointed out.

  Solemnly, Lorraine agreed. “There is that. Nobody tips maids. They don’t see us, so we’re out of mind. I think she was fighting with somebody,” she suddenly added. “That woman who died.”

  Everyone listened.

  “If it’s the same one,” she amended with a shrug. “I dunno. But if she had long black hair and fu—um … high heels—then I might have seen her coming out of the Diplomat. Seventh floor,” she clarified for Theresa’s benefit. “The meeting rooms. She was with some suit, and she was ripping him a new one. Something about a baby.”

  “What did she look like?” Theresa asked.

  “Tight skirt. Red top—I think. Karla loaned me to Catering, so I had to clear the water glasses from the Plaza Room. I was wheeling my little cart up the hallway, and they came out of Diplomat. She opened the door and stood there, and I heard ‘Blah, blah, blah, BABY!’ Then she shoved the door like Godzilla or something and stalked out. I remember thinking she would put holes in the carpet, stomping around in those spikes.”

  “What did the man look like?” Theresa asked, nearly holding her breath.

  “White, brown hair, suit and tie. Dunno. Nothing special.” Requests for further details elicited only further shrugs. Apparently the man hadn’t been half as interesting as Marie’s shoes.

  “Wher
e did they go after that?”

  “I think she went to the elevator. The guy just stood there. I pushed my tinkling little cart away and left.”

  “She was knocked up,” William said, but grimly. “That’s what they were arguing about. That’s why he killed her.”

  “Or he called her ‘baby’ and she didn’t like it,” Rachael suggested.

  Lorraine giggled. “Yeah, he tried that—‘Baby, you know I didn’t mean it’—and she told him what he could do with that.”

  A breeze wafted around the curve of the deck. Theresa had not heard the heavy outer door or a single footstep, but suddenly the woman from the front desk stood there. She did not speak but swept each kid with an evil eye worthy of an old-country grandmother. Then she walked away, and one by one the now-silent kids carefully removed themselves from the scaffold and went back to work, or home, or at least they stopped discussing the internal workings of the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

  “That’s Karla,” Rachael hissed to her mother.

  “Oh, I see. She’s had a hard day.”

  “No,” Rachael said as they crowded into the elevator. “She’s always like that.”

  CHAPTER 7

  *

  Theresa left Rachael in the lobby of the medical examiner’s office to be cooed over by the night receptionist and hung Marie Corrigan’s clothing in the drying room. Only the blood on the shirt needed such treatment, and the light smears had already dried, but procedure had to be followed—and besides, it allowed her to get in and out in five minutes. Then she hustled Rachael back into the car so they could finally call it a day.

  “So that’s what it’s like when a body turns up, huh?” Rachael mused as they drove up Cedar.

  “That’s what it’s like.”

  “It’s so … I don’t know, disruptive. Everyone’s life goes on hold. Like when there’s a tornado and you have to stop what you’re doing and go down in the basement.”

  “Yes. And also that sometimes the damage isn’t immediately visible.”

  “At least it was a defense attorney.”

  There are things you won’t admit, Theresa thought, not even to yourself. And definitely not to your children. “Don’t say that.”

  “Mom, you hate defense attorneys.”

  “No I don’t. Not really. Defense attorneys can sometimes seem like the bane of my existence, yes. But I understand them, too. I get that a lot of people—most of the people—in the criminal-justice system are not hardened, soulless monsters. They’re just Joe Schmo who drove too fast because he was mad at his boss, who took too many drugs and got addicted to them, who just couldn’t resist dipping his hand into the till. Do they deserve to answer for their crimes, yes, but are they a permanent danger to society, no. They need someone to advise them and walk them through the system. Serial rapists, child molesters, drug kingpins with eight executions under their belts—they’re a permanent danger to society. Attacking me to get those people off easy, that’s what I object to.”

  Rachael stared out the window, watching a plane land at Cleveland Hopkins as they took the narrow curve over I-480. “What do you mean, you understand them?”

  Theresa braked for a slowdown at the Bagley exit. “People think I’m a ghoul because I can walk up to a brutally murdered body and not blink an eye. But I do that because I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I have to photograph, then sketch, and then get out the markers, and I can’t forget to take that cigarette butt and that drop of blood.’ I don’t want to make a mistake, because other people’s lives are involved.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rachael prompted.

  “I figure it’s the same way with attorneys. When they’re assigned to someone who committed some awful crime, they don’t have time to sit there and think about the poor victim and what sort of human being would do something like that. They think about what they have to do: find out when the arraignment will be scheduled, file a motion to suppress, interview the witnesses, meet with the prosecutor and feel out the possibility of a plea. I can see how that very quickly becomes a habit, so that after a while the human suffering involved doesn’t even register.”

  “You get bogged down in the human suffering. You went around in a fog for three days after that baby-sitter mutilated that infant last year. And the mom of that one guy is still calling you.”

  “Only once in a while. I make a conscious effort to remind myself of the people involved. I don’t want to get to the point where I forget entirely.”

  “Did Marie Corrigan forget entirely?”

  “You never know what’s in someone else’s heart,” Theresa said. “But my best guess is yes, she did.”

  “Because she switched your fibers?”

  Theresa glanced over from the driver’s seat. “I told you that story, did I?”

  “Over and over for about a week.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And then the guy killed someone else. Maybe he killed this lawyer, too. Or maybe the husband of his last victim.”

  “His last victim didn’t have a husband. Her own family barely noticed she was dead. And the alleged perpetrator has been sighted in Texas.”

  “The prosecutor?”

  “If he’d been that upset about the trial, he’d have requested a new one. He’s already in private practice. The only person still upset about that case is me.”

  “Do you have an alibi?” Rachael teased.

  “Yes. You. We were home watching NCIS reruns all night.”

  “Yeah, but I’m your daughter. You can’t believe anything I’d say.” The girl twirled her hair for a few moments. “I still can’t believe she stole your evidence and you let her get away with it.”

  Theresa said, “No, some unknown entity ‘misplaced’ it. And there was nothing I could do.”

  “What about justice?”

  “Sometimes justice loses.”

  Another silence. This is parenting, Theresa thought. You feel guilty when you lie to your kids and sometimes guiltier when you tell them the truth. You want them to believe in the right things but to be prepared for the reality that others don’t.

  Rachael said, “So now you get to be her jury. And you’ve reached your verdict.”

  The words hit Theresa like an unexpected wave, one that knocks you off your board not because it’s that violent but because you didn’t see it coming. She had judged Marie Corrigan’s life and character and found both wanting. She would search for her killer, but only because he seemed even more depraved than his victim, not because she felt that Marie Corrigan deserved the justice she’d worked so hard to ravage. And Theresa would say nothing, only maintain her mask of righteous objectivity.

  But didn’t every human do that? Each person judges the next every minute of every day—people’s faces, their clothes, the way they pronounce a word or discipline their children.

  But then again, why shouldn’t they? Minds were trained from infancy to gather information and draw conclusions from it; ignoring that information would be foolish and a bit insulting. Why shouldn’t a human being observe other people’s character and actions and decide from that how to deal with them, what to think of them? What was so wrong with that?

  Another parenting question: Stick to the party line and insist that every life is sacred? Or tell the truth, that some are more sacred than others and some, as a measure of their character, not at all?

  They were silent for another two miles. Then Theresa used a lesson she’d learned from her mother and said, “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Tell me about William. He seems nice.”

  With a smile and a carefully casual voice, Rachael explained that he lived in Solon, played the drums, and was so kind to everyone. “He’s always willing to help Shawna unpack the toiletries, and that’s not even his job. He keeps Ray company on the loading dock—another charity case of his—while he has a smoke. Ray, not William.” William also had a cat and attended Bowling Green, planning to study, believe it or not, law.

  “No!” Theresa cried in mock horror. �
�Not another friggin’ lawyer!”

  “Criminal law, no less. At least he’ll have a steady income, getting all those scumbags back out on the street.”

  “Heavy sigh,” Theresa said, and gave one for emphasis. Then, more seriously, “I should have him talk to Sonia. She could fill him in on things the law-school recruiters wouldn’t, maybe talk him into the civil side.”

  “Relax,” Rachael said, gathering her belongings as they pulled in to the driveway. “Maybe he’ll be a prosecutor.”

  Theresa was about to say that that might not be an improvement for his home life, but Rachael had already run off to let the dog out. Besides, Theresa had already introduced the two kids to Sonia, and the lawyer—oddly—hadn’t had much to say.

  So what about this William? Nice enough, but with … what? An edge? An intensity? Maybe just a depth out of proportion for such a young man?

  To stick with the legal theme, when it came to William, the jury was still out.

  Theresa went inside to make dinner and feed the dog.

  CHAPTER 8

  *

  THURSDAY

  Her boss began to sing the next morning, never a good start to any day.

  “ ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead,’ ” Leo DiCiccio rang out in what might pass for a baritone under certain conditions—the trace-evidence lab of the medical examiner’s office not being one of them.

  “That’s harsh, dude,” Theresa said.

  “Yeah, I can see you’re all broken up about it, too. So she finally smacked the wrong ass, did she?”

  Theresa spread Marie Corrigan’s clothing out on the table before her, getting a better look. The red satin blouse, turned inside out, had a collar and three-quarter-length sleeves, one missing button, and four amorphous bloodstains on the back and the right shoulder. She pressed adhesive tape to the surface, picking it up and putting it down until she had done so to the entire surface. Then she turned the blouse right side out and repeated the procedure, careful to label the tapings as being from the inside or outside, front or back. “Who knows? It’s a hotel. There’s a ton of people there for this convention—”